Hansen crc pp - Princeton Universityassets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9757.pdf · In the cinema...

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copy Copyright Princeton University Press No part of this book may be distributed posted or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher

I n t r o d u c t I o n

As South Africa celebrated its first decade of freedom and democracy in 2004 a film called Broken Promises (Kumaran naidoo 2004) became a craze in durbanrsquos formerly Indian townships A slapstick family com-edy about a Hindi-speaking girl who marries into a tamil family the film followed a long tradition of local theater in these townships The acting story and dialogue had a semi-amateur style that was instantly recognizable from many plays I had attended in the Indian townships The film was packed with fast-paced dialogue that was sprinkled with vernacular abuse It was an instant hit and sold about 150000 copies within a year almost exclusively among the 13 million South Africans of Indian origin who lived mainly in durban and Johannesburg In 2005 this success was followed by the sequel Broken Promises 2 in 2006 Run for Your Life debuted which had a similar cast and story line and this was followed by Run for Your Life 2

I watched Broken Promises 2 in durban in June 2007 when it was fea-tured at the durban International Film Festival as a local contribution to an impressive list of international quality productions The venue was small and the audience was limited that evening with no more than three dozen people in the hall I chatted briefly with a number of people as we waited outside the hall An elderly American couple who were film enthusiasts looked forward to this local production and clearly expected something between a quality Bollywood movie and the art house genre that dominated the festival Behind me sat a group of young smartly dressed couples who spoke a mixture of Zulu and English which was characteristic of durbanrsquos new African elite A few rows down sat a conservatively dressed Indian couple of Gujarati de-scent with their young son

Half an hour into the film the American man leaned over and asked me ldquoIs this some spoof Is there something else coming afterrdquo I told him that what appeared to him as a spoof was indeed the film Some-what embarrassed he smiled and said ldquoI think we are leaving this was not what we expectedrdquo The Gujarati man got up fifteen minutes later cursing through his teeth that ldquoone was supposed to pay for such



2emsp bullemsp Introduction

garbagerdquo and dragged his disappointed family with him The young couples behind me were loudly discussing what the film was about and started laughing in disbelief at some of the exaggerated sound effects and the quality of acting Soon they also left the hall while making jokes about how this film was indeed a broken promise I soon found myself in the hall with a handful of local Indians who were laughing heartily while also sending me the only outsider left occasional glances and slightly nervous smiles as they watched my reactions

This slight measure of unease or mild embarrassment in my friends and informants was well known to me When watching a performance or partaking in this aspect of the cultural life of the Indian townships I often felt that I was watching something that was not meant for me as if I represented a gaze that was out of place This film was clearly neither meant for me nor made for my eyes The unease was not born of hostil-ity or protectiveness but rather from a sense of embarrassment now I could see for myself how things really were with them These films as most of the popular culture among South African Indians (which I will return to later in this book) revolve around an internal gaze that is making what people often refer to as ldquothe communityrdquo (of Indians in the country) visible to itself through jokes and self-deprecating humor This is where a ldquowerdquo is generated and reproduced a sense of who we really are where we came from and how foolish we are This is neither the official story nor any authorized representation of the community It is the informal inner space that most of my informants in the township and many who have left the township know very intimately It is also a side of the community that appears silly and unrefined to those who have climbed into the middle class or have constituted its historical elite since the nineteenth century Yet it is also funny because it mocks a past that was shared in the face of systematic discrimination and his-torical exclusion from institutional and public spaces in the country What unifies the South African Indians today are the laugh and the self-deprecating joke

This embarrassment vis-agrave-vis an outside gaze indicates one of the most difficult problematics across postapartheid South Africa to rede-fine identities communities and selves within a new economy of rec-ognition that is to live under a new and differentiated gaze that feels unfamiliar and never fully intelligible This differentiated gaze marks new horizons of recognitionmdashsome local some national and others global In the cinema hall that evening we the audience represented several forms of gazemdashthe foreign visitors the new black middle class the local Indian elitemdashall of whom were puzzled or even disappointed at the obvious banality of the film on display This small event was but



Introductionemsp bullemsp 3

one example of the daily misrecognitions that mark postapartheid South Africa

under the Gaze Freedom and race after Apartheid

to live under the gaze is fundamental to human consciousness to be seen is a physical and palpable sensation an ontological ground of be-ing human The gaze is neither restricted to people one knows nor to recognizable beings The gaze is constitutive fundamental to being or as Merleau-Ponty puts it in his reflections on visibility ldquoAs soon as I see it is necessary that the vision be doubled with a complimentary vi-sion or with another vision myself seen from without such as another world would see me installed in the midst of the visible occupied in considering it from a certain spotrdquo (1968 142) consciousness emerges from the assumption of a preexisting gaze that comes from all sides a strange unfathomable force that can never be entirely reduced to the specific social or cultural context in question and can never be reduced to sets of eyes that can be known ldquoit is not I who sees not he who sees because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us a vision in gen-eral being here and now of radiating everywhere and forever being an individual and also a dimension and a universalrdquo (ibid 142) In The Phenomenology of Perception (19452002) Merleau-Ponty reflects at length on the enigma of seeing ldquonothing is more difficult than to understand what we seerdquo as he proposes (2002 17 italics in the original) What ap-pears as immediately visible to the eye is but one dimension of what we perceive What we actually see is culturally and socially conditioned by received frames and formats When we see the front of a house we also ldquoseerdquo its full form and begin to assume its functions and even its people The visible is always supported and supplemented by a range of social conventions and tacit embodied forms of knowledge of how objects look from other sides as such in their totality (ibid 172)

This is analogous with Merleau-Pontyrsquos idea of language as a form of embodied convention a structure that helps a subject speak herself into existence as a person As the uttering of the sound of a word only acquires meaning within a certain community of embodied speech practices the physical sensing and seeing of an object is also embedded in a thick context of shared assumptions about how things and people look and act however historically provisional these may be In this the most common and fundamental dimension of being we always as-sume and impute a larger and more abstract gaze that beholds objects in their entirety and for which these objects exist as such regardless of our particular gaze This imputed gaze is a form of phantasmic regula-tor that provides an ontological guarantee of the veracity of the world




as it appears to us in our social imagination1 This labor of the guarantee also includes an embodied experience of onersquos self that always depends on the constitution of corporealitymdashthe social existence of the body seen objectified and vulnerable to the world as ldquoflesh constituted by the otherrdquo The relationship between embodiment (a sense of onersquos body) and corporeality (the body constituted by the gaze) is always asymmetrical if not discrepant2 Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were undoubtedly inspired by Simmelrsquos reflections on the mutual exchange of gazes in the modern city where the inability to fathom and read the face and gaze of the other and where the categorization and ldquode-individualizationrdquo of strangers assume critical and foundational impor-tance for production of sociality as such3

Lacan more than any other theorist elaborates the perspective of a split between the (actualphysical) eye and the (phantasmic) gaze into a theory of the barred subject subjectivity perpetually haunted by consti-tutive blockages and illegitimate desires and unable to complete itself What appears as a familiar gaze of actual people looking also stands for what Merleau-Ponty called ldquovision in generalrdquo a generalized gaze that splits the subject on the one hand the regulating assumption of social conventions and injunctions (the symbolic order) that regulates behavior even when no one is looking and on the other hand a fuzzy unfathomable demanding yet enticing and durable other gaze that has no language or stable form just pure presence The latter qua its lack of intelligibility can appear as a radical void of nothingness even as some-thing nonhuman uncanny or perhaps divine This unfathomablemdashand sometimes abjectmdashunderside of that which is visible and conventional never fails to unsettle and puncture subjectivity as such

The result is a perpetual economy of misrecognition where subjec-tivities are formed in anticipation of a regulating and desiring gaze but fail to fully embrace what they are supposed to be or become be-cause this second unfathomable gaze can never be fully understood or gauged Lacanrsquos formula for this perpetual misrecognition and ldquoecon-omy of lackrdquo is ldquoYou never look at me from the place from which I see you conversely what I look at is never what I wish to seerdquo (1977 103) Lacanrsquos fundamental position is that misrecognition is constitu-tive because the gaze always trumps the eye The most powerful desires and anxieties are always phantasmic circling around a more powerful truth that is believed to stand behind any face or appearance This split gaze constitutes on the one hand a (phantasmic) guarantee of an on-tological order and on the other hand a field of vision and experience fraught with instability doubt and anxieties of incompleteness

Situations of great social upheaval always undermine the visual re-gimes of recognition and fantasy that govern social life That was cer-




tainly true of the transition from apartheid to a new liberal-democratic order Let me sketch why the relationship between gaze anticipation and failed subjectification are so important in postapartheid South Africa

The nexus between a racialized social order and the privileging of the visible reached a historical climax in nazism Films public spec-tacles and body aesthetic were designed to provide a firm ontologi-cal ground of unambiguous categories the true German people and their multiple enemies (Gilroy 2002 137ndash77) The privileging of the visible in South Africa was historically more widespread naturalized and insidious While race thinking was embedded in every aspect of the economic order it also found strong expression in scientific racism which always privileged physical appearance in the absence of any firm genetic objective proof of linkages between phenotypical and socio-cultural qualities (dubow 1995) race thinking became a hegemonic political common sense (norval 1996) and acquired a reality of its own a widespread and deeply embedded popular economy of belief that invariably embedded behavior and social practice in phenotypically marked bodies today no statement no sentence and no gesture can acquire its full meaning and significance in South Africa without being linked to and invariably qualified by the phenotypical classification of the speaker An individualrsquos pigmentation is what can be seen by the eye but is also alwaysalready inserted and framed by a larger gaze a schema of racial ideology that makes bodily pigmentation the very root cause of intrinsic social qualities and cultural propensities

Fanon begins his Black Skin White Masks by discussing the body first the scandal of sexual unions between racially defined groups and sec-ond the deprivation of people of color of the ability to have authentic embodied selves culture and historicity According to Fanon the im-position of an all-important ldquoracial epidermal schemardquo meant that ldquoI was responsible at the same time for my body for my race and for my ancestorsrdquo (111) He continues by comparing himself to a Jew ldquoAll the same the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness He is not wholly what he is His actions his behavior are the final determinant [but] I am given no chance I am overdetermined from without I am a slave not of the lsquoidearsquo that others have of me but of my own appearancerdquo (116) Thus a larger racialized gaze always trumps structures and gives meaning to that which is actual and visiblemdashan individual being or a singular event Such a complex gaze prestructures any subjectivity ldquoIn this country we are imprisoned in our bodies we cannot escaperdquo was how a friend in durban described racialization in South Africa This fundamentally corporeal and racial structure of the gaze has durably shaped common-sense perceptions of race among a majority of South Africans




While I cannot disagree with Gilroyrsquos penetrating critique of the ut-terly senseless and illogical basis of contemporary racism (2002 11ndash53) and his description of race as ldquoan impersonal discursive arrangement the brutal result of the raciological ordering of the world not its causerdquo (2005 39) I believe that the institutional force of this ldquodiscursive ar-rangementrdquo has produced entire social worlds Every ethnographer of South Africa will have to reckon with this social fact in order to under-stand and describe contemporary social and cultural life in the country

The existence over decades of a repressive state apparatus whose multiple institutions tried to monitor make visible and police racial boundaries created an acute consciousness of being watched by the authorities This gaze was panoptic disciplining and regulative by making objects and bodies visible and intelligible in the full sense of biopolitical rationalities that were entirely structured by racial catego-ries despite its totalizing intentions the apartheid state was far from always effective in regulating social practices yet governmental prac-tices created an acute sense of watching and being watched albeit with different intensity A constant second-guessing of the gaze of the state produced fine-grained readings mostly imaginary in nature of differ-ent degrees of freedom and physical security in different locations Spa-tial limits were policed with utmost severity and violence with respect to African populations while other population groups were regulated less violently but in greater and more intrusive detail Almost every South African had to viscerally internalize the tacit boundaries of the permissible and conventional with respect to the surveillance by the state whether real or not Such a life under the gaze of the law and the state did indeed create what crossley has called an ldquoanxious aware-nessrdquo4 It also allowed the carving out of less-visible spaces where fur-tive enjoyment and unique social rules thrived often semisecret and rarely shared freely with others The strictures on social and political life have changed profoundly within the last fifteen years but the legacy of this gaze of the state and the social attitudes predilections and lasting inequalities it shaped (Macdonald 2006) continue to exert enormous influence in the lives of ordinary people

Because life during apartheid became so rigidly divided along race lines and yet remained intimate and close in workplaces and homes every South African had to learn to live according to a complex cultural economy that was structured by several forms of (imputed) gaze ra-cialized identities and anxieties were played out at every level of social and intimate life The result was a set of complex performative anxiet-ies that are by no means unique to South Africa but became more de-veloped there than in most other societies no matter who and where one is one is always being watched and looked at through the eyes of




someone who represents another social and racial category and thus a different world maybe even a different ontological horizon the live-in maid the employer the man in a passing car the neighbor the walkers on the street the official the policeman and so on The unique fea-ture of South Africa is that every physical space remains historically marked and defined by a single racial categorymdashrarely two or more Social spaces are marked by calculations of physical danger appropri-ateness and risk Every act and individual utterance is alwaysalready doubled as a representation of a racial category that ldquoactsrdquo through the act or utterance In other words the eye of any onlooker is also always the gaze of the category one is always potentially doubled by the category onersquos actions can always be interpreted as a category that is acting through onersquos body one is always potentially reducible to a phe-notype a cultural cipher or a racialized shadow or doppelgaumlnger The category functions as a constant shadow every action takes place in the gaze of the other even when that other is not physically watching With Merleau-Ponty one can say that forms of embodiment understood as the subjective inhabitation of a body alwaysalready coexisted in an irrevocable tension with the racialized categories of corporeality that were constituted and reproduced from without

racialization of every dimension of social life produced a peculiar ldquoflatness of public perceptionrdquo by which I mean that the categorical doppelgaumlnger the stereotype provided the script and the interpretive grid within which individual actionmdashand anxietymdashwas situated This de-individualization and anxious flatness of public perception continue to haunt virtually every corner of South African society The peculiarly commanding and yet ineffective gaze of the apartheid state rendered spaces of private and cultural intimacy somehow pleasurable and safe The flatness of public representation has perpetuated a structure of so-cial life in which an actual sense of individuality depth and complete-ness only seem possible comforting and attractive within the intimacy of onersquos own racial-cultural world because only there can one merge with onersquos racial shadow and make it less intrusive and obvious

The seismic shift in the political order of South Africa since 1994 has been experienced first and foremost in a profound transformation of the social imaginary and a transformation of the order of the gaze Apartheid tried to structure social practices of all kinds under a uni-fied gaze of the state that purported to stand for and represent West-ern civilization as a form of universality For people of color apartheid institutionalized the idea of the customary and traditional as a form of internal gaze enforced by political-cultural elites and institutions within each racial and ethnic community




The postapartheid scenario was equally enticing and confusing on both of these dimensions on the one hand the events of 1994 cre-ated a strong sense of the country becoming readmitted into the larger universal history and into a postcolonial and globalizing present now South Africa was no longer the exception the anachronistic remainder of colonial violence that for decades made the country and its social or-der a central object in a universal and global condemnation of racism as an absolute evil condemnation of apartheid unified postcolonial gov-ernments and progressive forces across the world in a common moral and political front In the 1990s the new South Africa was to enjoy the fruits of that global visibility and global moral stature

However apart from iconic people like Mandela or tutu it was un-clear who could represent or embody this imputed global universality It soon became obvious that the celebrated nonracial doctrine of the African national congress amounted to nothing more than a poetic vision of a rainbow nation In his famous inaugural address in 1994 Mandela said ldquoWe enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans both black and white will be able to walk tall without any fear in their hearts assured of their inalienable right to human dignitymdasha rainbow nation at peace with itself and the worldrdquo

nonracialism now became an injunction to find authentic expres-sion within the multicultural nation now that you are free define your-self as you truly are define your own culture and your own history Many South Africans embraced the promises of hope and redemption within the peculiar postauthoritarian ldquomillennial capitalismrdquo that arose in the 1990s across the globe (comaroff and comaroff 2001) Aspira-tions toward self-making within a global horizon also found strong ar-ticulations in the gospel of health wealth and self-improvement within the global Pentecostal movement and in the self-respect purity and strength promised by globalized Islam

on the other hand it remained unclear who was looking and who was listening Who was evaluating and appreciating me as I truly am Who was the community of new South Africans The indisputable emo-tional strength of African nationalism notwithstanding no credible and legitimate formulation of what constitutes the South African nation and people had been produced South Africans do not exist as ldquoa peoplerdquo (chipkin 2007 1ndash15) only as discrete groups sharing a territory and a history of deep segmentation and bloody antagonism Although many discrete struggles against the state had been loosely confederated under the sign of a future freedom from minority rule no compelling idea of a unified ldquopeoplerdquo had emerged The question of who was an entitled citizen was still framed in racial terms truly shared public spaces where nonanxious mixing of communities may occur remain scarce and have




been provided mainly by new commercial media and new commercial spaces and shopping malls across the country

A central proposition in this book is that the legacy of colonial and apartheid regulation and cultural policy has made the embodied imagi-nation of a range of imputed gazes extraordinarily compelling and complex in everyday life The authority and compulsion of these gazes the recognition they elicit and demand and the anxieties they instill have been in rapid flux over the past fifteen to twenty years The deeper theme of this bookmdashhow the meanings and spaces of freedom and de-mocracy are perceived and inhabited by nonprivileged South African Indiansmdashreveal contradictory sentiments that are shared across many other communities in the country

Freedom and Sovereignty after Apartheid

The antiapartheid movement was driven by two not always compatible desires freedom and sovereignty on the face of it these two desires are eminently compatible as goals for a modern and autonomous self that is embedded in and empowered by a sovereign nation The equation of personal freedom and national self-realization is perhaps the single most suggestive and influential idea of the past century5 The equation is heavily indebted to a classical Kantian understanding of freedom as the primacy of an inner and autonomous capacity for judgment the capacity to impose a moral law on oneself and an inner freedom that enables the release of the free will as the source of true freedom6 Free-dom is measured by the ability to realize a true and autonomous self a self that matures and outgrows its need for tutelage a self that trusts itself and its own judgments (Kant 1963)

Many critiques of the implicit political theology of the idea of inner emancipation of the human will with all its christian baggage have demonstrated that freedom of the modern self was not a self-evident universality7 The imagining of free selves was always shaped by the specific structure of unfreedom they arose from and the national and cultural community they claimed as their sovereign vehicle With this in mind let us begin with a few reflections on the structure of unfreedom in South Africa and the racially differentiated ideas of personhood and sovereignty it gave rise to

Although violent and authoritarian the apartheid state never de-pended on the regimentation of speech text and language which is so ably analyzed by Alexei Yurchak in the case of the Soviet union (2005) The power of the apartheid regime depended exactly on the reverse on a robust body politics that governed categorized and separated on the basis of ldquoobjectiverdquo phenotypical marks that determined everything




dwelling types of work education income level range of mobility and forms of information and styles of speech available to different groups Apartheid recruited visceral fears and relied on what the regime saw as natural prelinguistic and affective ties which emerged from shared phenotypical marks Through infrastructure and biopolitical engineer-ing apartheid made a racialized world appear natural and a given It was the structure of everyday life and the reproduction of easy entitle-ment and privilege that kept apartheid going rather than any ritualized public commitment to an idea de facto acceptance of this structure of life counted for support for apartheid rather than any overt state-ments or special effort The perfect white citizen moved among her own kind consumed mowed her lawn and enjoyed life without too much reflection

Even those critical of this structure of body politics were forced to and indeed invited to partake in the easy life of relative privilege and considerable freedom for those classified as whites In this Athenian de-mocracy there was considerable freedom of movement and speech for the fully entitled white citizen8 The included but less entitled (Indians and colored) had to live with severe restrictions on movement and life opportunities but were relatively secure within the boundaries of their racially defined world The nonentitled (Africans) were seen as wholly outside forever destined to live in their traditional life worlds in Ban-tustans submitting to the yoke of the nkosi (chief) and only visiting the republic as temporary guest workers9

There was indeed censorship and surveillance but its main target was seditious activity and actual organization among people of color in the country The enemy was first and foremost the communist orga-nizer not necessarily the critical intellectual Physical repression was also carefully calibrated routinized categorical brutality was meted out to Africans while other race groups were disciplined by exemplary incarcerations or occasional eliminations of individual ldquoenemies of the staterdquo The preferred site of the apartheid planner was the regulation of everyday practices The target was the predilections and habits of ordinary life that enabled its language games little comforts and sense of knowability in racial enclaves and townships Apartheidrsquos attempts at ideological persuasion of people of color were generally clumsy and ill-fated

In this world of authoritarian rule by a highly visible minority and deep racial-spatial segmentation of everyday life the idea of freedom and autonomous self-making gradually split into two discrete horizons on the one hand there was a strong desire for majority rule and the resurrection of the sovereignty of African people and communities the horizon presented by the now-exiled Anc whose position was




strongly supported by large sections of the international community10

on the other hand there was the more mundane desire for further au-tonomy in everyday life for enjoying moments of sociality dignity and cohesion around community events in community spaces cultural and social autonomy and a measure of self-governance were actively promoted by the apartheid state as a way of deflecting political ener-gies away from the question of sovereignty and majority rule More important community spaces and townships also became the primary horizons of social life and shaped social identities and political action Local protests were loosely connected with other political actions else-where in the country particularly under the umbrella of the united democratic Front (udF) in the 1980s but rarely under the sign of a unified national aspiration

The fall of apartheid produced a strong sense of an epochal event that turned entire social worlds languages and imaginaries into anach-ronisms Freedom had been yearned for and apartheid had been glob-ally represented as an anachronistic settler state that delayed South Africa in emerging as a free and sovereign African nation Yet no one had fully anticipated how quickly the particular affective ties that had formed meaningful communities during the decades of apartheidmdash township cultures the lingo of the comrades aesthetic production op-posed to the state and so onmdashlost public validity and ethical coherence after 1994 As Anc rapidly adopted a technocratic language of service delivery and stakeholders the heroic pathos of the struggle rhetoric was rendered evermore anachronistic

The new official policy of multiculturalism spurred an unprecedented revival of cultural and religious identities across the country They were all attempts to embrace a newfound freedom often by recovering older registers of cultural memory As we will see in this book some of these registers were haunted by the perpetual embarrassment caused by the recent past and by the pleasures and memories of community life dur-ing apartheid that had so pervasively shaped ordinary life in townships across the country including during the years of militant struggle In his reflexive memoir on the moral communities that structured his childhood township in Johannesburg Jacob dlamini writes ldquothere is nothing wrong with native nostalgia a longing for a lost home set in a politically problematic time and place I attempt to seize hold of memories without which we cannot understand why apartheid suffered the kind of moral defeat that led to its demiserdquo (2009 152) It was in fact the strength of ordinary township life rather than the rhetoric of its anomie that ultimately broke apartheid dlamini suggests The cur-rent popularity of Jacob Zuma and his election to become president of Anc in 2007 and later president of the country in 2008 was based on




a heterogeneous range of affective political registers that had lain dor-mant in the townships for more than a decademdashhypermasculine Zulu identity labor militancy struggle rhetoric and anticapitalist advocacy of nationalization and social redistribution11

Similar configurations of hope and the contradictory recollection of a past that cannot be openly yearned for characterize many other seg-ments of South African society The injunction to acquire a new kind of past is intrinsic to the moment of new sovereign self-making as free sub-jects recast the past as nothing but a gradual yearning and struggle for freedom critique the recalcitrance of the older social habits and com-forts of unfreedom but celebrate the past in a way that permanently relegates it to anachronistic oblivion and cuddly irrelevance

In order to understand the continuing emotional attachments to the habits and spaces of unfreedom that I explore in this book let us turn to the theme of melancholia and loss through Hegelrsquos reflections on the dialectic between the lord and the bondsman in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) Hegel suggests that while the lord is the site of pure desire and consumption of the world and its goods the bondsman achieves a sense of himself through labor Labor is a manifestation of negativity both in its ability to transform objects and in its marking of an irre-ducible difference vis-agrave-vis the lord The bondsmanrsquos desire is expressed in the ability to produce and shape things although the enjoyment of these things remains reserved for the lord The recognition taking place between the two is actually a perpetual misrecognition the lord be-lieves himself to be autonomous but this autonomy depends entirely on the labor of the bondsman whose desire he needs but cannot desire because it has no value for him The bondsman derives a sense of him-self and dignity of labor from being able to leave a mark on the world a ldquosignaturerdquo as Butler puts it (1997 37ndash40) Yet his autonomy is il-lusory inasmuch as he only desires through the lordrsquos desire and thus can be nothing without the lord The larger point is of course that this dialectic marks a single but irrevocably divided consciousness (Hegel 1977 104ndash12)

With the Aufhebung (elevationcancellationovercoming) of this con-tradiction and the delivery of the bondsman into a state of freedom something curious if entirely logical happens the consciousness of the former bondsman splits into two as he produces an ethical law of the community that becomes the source of the regulation of his desires of prohibition and the injunctions to work and leave signatures on the world This leads to the birth of what Hegel famously called an ldquoun-happy consciousnessrdquomdasha consciousness divided within itself and never fully identical with itself (127ndash28)




The unhappy consciousness is marked by a loss of certainty that was secured by the negativity of the other and a loss of the (often ma-levolent) sure-handedness imputed to the lord As the question ldquoWho am Irdquo or rather ldquoWhat am I for yourdquo is no longer answered by the lord the free subject has to figure out whose desires it wants to desire and what in the subject others may want to desire The question that is opened and that can never be fully answered is on which ontological ground can the subject imagine itself as striving to become a free and reflexive being

The usefulness of this formal model for historical moments of libera-tion should be obvious12 But it is also insufficient because it does not in itself account for the marking of the bondsmen as racialized bodies bearing bodily marks that demand complex re-signification as marks of freedom and sovereignty In her analysis of Hegelrsquos relationship to the victorious slave revolution in Haiti which was unfolding as The Phenomshyenology was written Buck-Morss argues that Hegel was most probably a cultural racist He took inspiration from the events in Haiti but dis-carded the capacity of black slaves to develop true interiority and true freedom (2009 21ndash77) However as Buck-Morss also acknowledges this civilizational racism did not diminish the momentous influence of Hegelian notions of struggles for self-realization as authentic history on nationalist revolutionary and anticolonial thought and practice for two centuries13

In Arendtrsquos famous essay on freedom she engages the limits of Hege-lian thought and suggests that the only proper form of freedom lies beyond ldquothe socialrdquo (and its unhappy consciousness) as a horizon Free-dom only appears through true political action by which she means acts that create something new that enact a beginning as suchmdashnot for instrumental gain securing sovereign rule or protecting property or other rationalities of ldquothe socialrdquo but for their very opposite to show fidelity to a principle or to create a new society or new social form Free-dom is nothing but the wages of political courage and without courage there is no real politics ldquoIt takes courage to leave the protective security of our four walls and enter the public realm not because of particular dangers which may lie in wait for us but because we have arrived in a realm where concern for life has lost its validity courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the worldrdquo (Arendt 2000 448) This leads Arendt to a conceptualization of true political action as a form of miracle analogous with the logic of organic and natural pro-cesses of birth and gestation that rely on ldquoinfinite improbabilitiesrdquo ldquoIn the realm of human affairs we know the author of lsquomiraclesrsquo It is men who perform themrdquo (460)14




Such a heroic concept of politics corresponds quite directly with the horizon of revolutionary transformation that was promoted by an exiled Anc for decades When South African transition eventually did take place it was widely referred to as a form of miracle strangely removed from the flow of everyday life15 A set of fortuitous events emerged from bloody street fights and from courageous opposition in thousands of battles for rights but the result was nonetheless a negotiated solution of a radically different order than that of daily existence In popular po-litical imagination freedom was made possible in large measure by the presence of one man Mandela Force and circumstance had removed him from the grit violence and meanness of late apartheid which in turn allowed him to appear as an author of the new society The script and the excitement of the new possibilities after apartheid were exhila-rating and unnerving at the same time It is telling that this new and still alien order was widely referred to as the ldquopostapartheid dispen-sationrdquo dispensation is a term with theological roots and means an order handed down by supreme authority (eg by God the church or by law) but it can simultaneously refer to an exemption a temporal phase bracketed by exceptional circumstances The ldquodispensationrdquo was soon given form and body in the new constitution in 1996 a farsighted and progressive document that expresses the spirit and aspiration of postapartheid freedom while also being at odds with many prevailing social norms in the country The constitution was produced as a small pocket-sized book with the subtitle ldquoone law for one nationrdquo (emphasis in original) and millions of copies were distributed across the country in an attempt to make it ldquothe property of the peoplerdquo as a high-ranking Anc member put it to me in 1998 However in order to retain its foun-dational and quasi-magical force as a symbol of sovereign collective freedom the constitution and the new constitutional court had to re-main elevated above the flow of ordinary life and what soon became ldquoordinaryrdquo politics16

When ldquothe thrill was gonerdquo and heroic struggle politics gave way to gradual administrative change and a liberal regime of rights17 it became clear that the resistance to apartheid in the 1980s had indeed been forged within political and social horizons that were strongly lodged in ldquothe socialrdquo produced by apartheid in localities and specific communities18

For the majority freedom had not been imagined as individual self-expression or revolutionary transformation but as collective and con-structive acts that secured community and dignity as it was known and lived or as Simmel argues about modern freedom ldquoFreedom consists in a process of liberation it rises above a bond [but] finds its meaning consciousness and value only as a reaction to it the individual is tied




to others and ties othersrdquo (1950 121ndash22) The problem was to acknowl-edge precisely what freedom entailed Hegel describes the moment of freedom as one of alienation It is marked by an inability to fully rec-ognize that its very own essence lies in the mere effort at ldquodesiring and workingrdquo in everyday life itself ldquoWhere that lsquootherrsquo is sought it cannot be found for it is supposed to be just a beyond something that can not be found consciousness therefore can only find as a present reality the grave of its life the unhappy consciousness merely finds itself desiring and working it is not aware that to find itself active in this way implies that it is in fact certain of itself and that its feeling of the alien existence is this self-feelingrdquo (1977 131ndash32 emphasis in original)

to understand work and life the old categories of unfreedom as the very sites of a new freedom turned out to be particularly difficult in South Africa The apartheid governance through biopolitics space and everyday routines meant that when freedom arrived it could barely be recognized as a new horizon but instead appeared as a continuation of the old For some freedom signified a redemptive dream of radical change in life circumstances and futures and a complete break with the apartheid past For most people however the idea of freedom revolved around more modest and concrete aspirations a new house a secure job education and securing of their enclaves of relatively autonomous life At the level of locality and community the transition from ldquorevolu-tion to rightsrdquo (robins 2008) turned out to be more seamless than many an Anc functionary had imagined now it was Anc cadres turned bureaucrats and ministers that were expected to deliver the daily wages of liberal freedom

Melancholia of Freedom

Anxiety embarrassment and obsessions with the gaze and visibility may be particularly pronounced among South African Indians The forging of this category of people from many discrete and disparate parts of the Indian subcontinent into a single racial and cultural cat-egory was accompanied by constant charges of being culturally alien people The position of Indians in the economy and the political struc-ture in South Africa as an intermediate group of ldquoquasi citizensrdquo be-tween white privilege and African disenfranchisement only heightened the sense of perpetual marginality Yet the story that follows could have been told about many other groups in South Africa a country whose society is deeply segmented and internally separated A society of mi-grants and recent urbanites the majority of South Africans live far away from anything they can call their proper home in a cultural or historical sense Just like the people of chatsworth who appear in this book most




South Africans struggle to inhabit their urban spaces their history and their new political and cultural freedoms

As I began fieldwork I was immediately struck by a pervasive sense of loss and displacement The transformation of the South African economy has resulted in an economic marginalization of the Indian working class The township has also changed today thousands of Africans live in informal shacks or in newly built government houses in chatsworth and in other formerly Indian areas The effect of these changes has been a multilayered sense of loss loss of economic security loss of the township as ldquoour placerdquo loss of perceived existential and physical safety and a loss of what Hegel called the ldquoloss of the lossrdquo that is the disappearance of the blockagemdashunfreedom and apartheidmdash that prevented true self-realization and thus explained most problems and shortcomings in everyday life

The second remarkable feature of life in chatsworth was the ubiq-uity of the self-deprecating humor that made Broken Promises such a roar-ing success Jokes stories and everyday mockery of the charou (local slang for nonrespectable Indians) way of life constituted an important medium for reflection on a very uncertain future I realized that self-deprecating humor and stinging satire had been central to Indian life in South Africa for many decades (Hansen 2000) In his well-known essay Mourning and Melancholia Freud argues that while mourning expresses the feeling of loss of a loved object melancholia may be ldquoa reaction to the loss of a loved objectrdquo (1969 245) when one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost The patient knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost as a result The symptoms of this condition are often difficult to gauge and understand for both the melancholic and those around him Yet one symptom is clear self-reproach and self-reviling Freud continues ldquoThe melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourningmdashan extraordinary diminution in his self-regard an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scalerdquo (246) In mourning it is the world that has become poor and empty in melancholia it is the ego itself19 Freud argues that the melancholic incorporates the unrecogniz-able loss into her own self where it reemerges as a peculiar enjoyment in reviling the self as flawed and imperfect

This formulation of melancholia resonates with the multilayered sense of loss and the representations of everyday life in this particular community Much public debate many performances and much infor-mal conversation are organized around an oscillation between intense self-reproach regarding the past conservatism tradition of introver-sion and loving self-absorption and idealization of family life culture and sociality This oscillation is marked by melancholia rather than nos-talgia20 Melancholia arises from a deep anxiety regarding how the iden-




tity and history can be represented and enunciated The attachment to the recent past during apartheid where community life flourished in the racial enclave cannot be publicly enunciated at this point except as narratives of struggles to defy the state The emotional attachments to this period and its forms of life must remain repressed and can only be referred to in intimate and informal settings Like in other sections of South African society the loss of this deeply problematic past its plea-sures and its forms of life cannot be acknowledged The past is tense and the experience of freedom becomes melancholic

Between Irrelevance and Irreverence ldquoour culturerdquo after Apartheid

The end of apartheid entailed a challenge to everyday life and revisions of many social practices and forms of everyday speech Many ordinary people retained their attachments to the community life of the town-ship imperfect but intimate known and comforting others reached out and beyond the township in search of larger global and diasporic identities or universal religious communities Immersing myself in the township I found myself confronted with two analytical rubrics The first was the concept of ldquodiasporardquo Most of my initial assumptions were shaped by a tacit understanding that South African Indians were at-tached to a deep and affective sense of cultural practices that tied them to South Asia Many local organizations much local scholarship and a good chunk of public discourse including a resurgent interest in Bol-lywood aesthetics and stars seemed to confirm the existence of such a durable link

I soon realized that such a perspective locked me into an interpre-tive frame that elided the deep entanglements and profound shaping of social life in the city and the township chatsworth must be seen as a moment in the history of a ldquopermanent minorityrdquo that is embedded in a colonial and postcolonial territory where every claim to belong-ing land and livelihood has been contested for a century The anti-immigrant violence in May 2008 which affected migrants from Africa and also people of Asian origin21 instantly reactualized the deep sense of alienation and questioned the status of Indians as true citizens as had been the case during anti-Indian riots in 1949 and 1985 diaspora is in other words not a condition that applies permanently to cultural minorities anywhere but is a particular framing of a ldquocall of historyrdquo and a particular framework for cultural self-making that people respond to according to class position alienating political events and their local political imagination I will explore this problem and the cultural at-tachments to South Asia be they virtual or concrete toward the end of his book




The second analytical rubric was that of everyday life Many progres-sive and left-leaning intellectuals in South Africa assume that ldquothe only good Indian is a poor Indianrdquomdashthe still powerful idea that ordinary and poor Indians in the township harbor genuinely nonracial ideas of solidarity and justice as opposed to the culturally conservative and race-conscious Indian middle class22 There is a deep romantic nexus between everyday life and the supposed authenticity of the poor and marginalized that has exerted considerable influence in political prac-tice here as in many other parts of the world and indeed in the theory and practice of anthropology

Everyday life understood as the institutionalized and highly struc-tured routines of movement work leisure and dwelling characteristic of modern societies23 was the preferred site of apartheidrsquos robust bio-political interventions For generations of Africans and other people of color the dull disciplinary routines of work township and trains were sites of violent subjection and occasional heroic bursts of defiance These were key institutions in what Will Glover in his work on urban planning has called a ldquomaterialist pedagogyrdquo that is ldquothe ordinary ma-terial fabric of a modern city would continuously irrigate its residents with a flow of salutary effectsrdquo (2008 xxi) These effects were imagined to instill in the natives what they were lacking an interiorized self-discipline capacity for work and practical appreciation of the ordered aesthetics of modern life This form of material government relied on daily material routines and diminished the reliance on ideological per-suasion This had important precedents in the mission stations and the early colonial state in South Africa In a set of incisive reflections on the analogous interests in the everyday by christian missionaries and social theorists Jean and John comaroff note ldquoa crucial goal of the Protes-tant outreach was to implant the methodical habits that produced civil self-disciplined christian subjects [both missionaries and social theorists of practice] evince a distrust of contemplative truths opting instead for a vision of homo faber of human life as the product of instru-mental actionrdquo (1997 30) This identification of everyday life as a site of virtue has roots in a wider Protestant celebration of the lay of ordinary speech of work and of thrift and modesty (taylor 1989 211ndash303) It also marks a fundamental acceptance of the leveling and objectifying effects of modernity on the modern self ldquoits double life as subject and object This being was at once unique and faceless a self-conscious individual and an impersonal noun at once lsquosomebodyrsquo a named mortal and lsquoanybodyrsquo the generic man in the streetrdquo (comaroff and comaroff 1997 32)

As we will see later everyday and ordinary life as a set of material disciplinesmdasherasing the old while shaping the recalcitrant or unwilling




native mindmdashassumed a central place in twentieth-century governmen-tality in South Africa and elsewhere in the (post)colonial world This obvious fact has had surprisingly little impact on how anthropology constructs the everyday and the ordinary as its new privileged place of investigation Anthropology abounds with submerged assumptions about the autonomy discrete ontologies and moral force assumed to be intrinsic to this realm of life de certeau deleuze Foucault James Scott and even the notion of ldquosubalternityrdquo understood as a relatively uncolonized form of life serve as standard references But neither colo-nial governmentality nor Protestant ideology make regular appearances in this work not even in work that critically assesses and questions the force of the everyday as an analytical optic24

In Veena dasrsquos recent foregrounding of the ldquoordinaryrdquo as the privi-leged site of anthropological intervention and knowledge this blind spot is particularly obvious (2007) dasrsquos main inspiration is the late Wittgensteinrsquos (and Stanley cavellrsquos) view of the world as constituted through series of provisional inadequate but nonetheless functioning language games that in their turn produce both selves and sociality (nei-ther of these being whole or complete) as ldquoforms of liferdquo (lebensformen) (Wittgenstein 1953 19ndash23) cavell accepts the assertion that there are indeed ordinary language games that can provide proper ldquohomesrdquo for words places where words and their referents actually mean somethingmdash that is have a certain stability and real meaning within certain commu-nitiesmdashas forms of life These are the spaces where ldquoacknowledgmentrdquo is foundmdashof oneself and of others By acknowledgment cavell means not just to recognize the other in the Hegelian sense but to make an at-tempt to see the other person as shehe actually dwells in the world I understand this to be a more intense if not intimate striving than that of neighborliness It is in fact a desire to understand the very subjectiv-ity of the other25

The ordinary plays a double role in dasrsquos work and both of them are redemptive first as the limit of language understood as a set of nondiscursive and mundane practices mostly illustrated as forms of life among slum-dwellers and victims of violence in India who are ca-pable of overcoming pain and of ldquopick[ing] up the pieces to find out whether and how to go onrdquo (2007 6) and second as the very opposite namely the true origin and referent of language in a more authentic or original sense as when she writes on the very last page of the book that the role of anthropologists is ldquowitnessing the descent into the ev-eryday through which victims and survivors affirm the possibility of life by removing it from circulation of words gone wildmdash leading words home so to speakrdquo (221) I take this to mean that words come home to those who properly own them but are unable to utter them without




the aid of anthropologists or other interlocutors In this move actual speech public statements and ritualized conduct by those who claim social or cultural authority in the communities studied or those who may just speak and banter may be relegated to a realm of the mediated even not-so-ordinary only those properly equipped (with cavell or anthropology) seem able to decipher the whispers and murmurs of the ordinary

Against such an obliquely moralizing perspective this book focuses on the everyday as a site of open conflict and moral debate The every-day culture I document and analyze in detail is not merely the some-how inexplicable preserve of those who are poor marginal silent or without the capacity to express themselves in public speech The ev-eryday practices of ordinary people youth newcomers women and religious people are indeed the manifest object of much worry reflec-tion and joking in homes and cars in markets and newspaper columns and in taxis and talk shows The local terms for this shared object vary from generalized notions of kinship the idea of the ldquoIndian familyrdquo or to the colloquial notion of being charou Much of this charou culture is regarded as embarrassing inappropriate and outright ridiculousmdashand even a blockage to the full embrace of freedom The status of the every-day is in other words not a semivisible ontology waiting to be divined The status of everyday life as a space of meaning and ldquoour culturerdquo is a problem right at the heart of life as it is lived in chatsworthmdasha life that is irrevocably split between an external and an internal view of one-self strung between several gazes and marked by highly flexible modes of self-presentation It is a life that is reflexive and worldly but also suffused by intimate and intensely self-absorbed forms of enjoyment Prior to 1994 much political rhetoric posited the ldquoinnerrdquo community life as the source of moral cohesion and even as containing the seeds of a future redemption and renewal26 This powerful political fiction of cultural unity pride and even purity was shared from parts of the Anc to the conservative right but soon splintered into many discrete parts in the 1990s In its stead emerged an anxious life in freedom and a split gaze that was very pronounced among the people I studied but also paradigmatic of many other segments of South African society

Structure of the Book

I have structured the book around three major themes (1) the vexed and morally complex question of the constitution and practices of life in unfreedom and of ordinary life in the apartheid township (2) the hopes pleasures anxieties and alienations that erupted in the 1990s as a new postapartheid society invited everybody to embrace freedom and




reinvent themselves and (3) the process of reimagining oneself claim-ing identities and recasting historical narratives and collective memo-ries in a present torn between a commitment to a contested and feeble South African nationalism and a variety of global and diasporic desires

These three broad themes do not suggest any inevitable flow from unfreedom into self-invention The problem of rewriting the past be-came more urgent as the new society and its freedoms emerged Every-thing became illuminated and inflected but never redeemed by history and each chapter incorporates the echoes of this celebrated and also disavowed past that is so omnipresent in the lives of the people I am describing

chapter 1 ldquoEthnicity by Fiat The remaking of Indian Life in South Africardquo forms the foundation for subsequent chapters by telling the story of how the Asiatic question was configured in South Africa from the 1860s to the present as a question of necessary containment of cul-turally alien people I tell the story of how the township of chatsworth was set up imagined and framed as a purely Indian space over decades of tense and often antagonistic tussle between policy makers and so-cial activists I look at how specific methods of policing contributed to the current mythology of the Indian township during apartheid as fundamentally safe as a place where ldquowe never locked our doorsrdquo This chapter draws on official documents newspapers and governmen-tal publications as well as a range of narratives by older residents of chatsworth

chapter 2 ldquodomesticity and cultural Intimacyrdquo explores how the space of the township gradually became marked and coded as a space that was interior to Indian life I chart the emergence of the figure of the charou in the township as the constant other of the emergent re-spectable Indian community in chatsworth Mainly based on archival material narratives and ethnographic material this chapter shows how the older figure of the ldquocoolierdquomdashthe stereotyped lower-caste plantation workermdashgives way to a new and deracinated menace and irritant within the township that is equated with ldquobackwardnessrdquo and stubborn tradi-tional conservatism which needs to be reformed in order for the com-munity to fully evolve I trace various genres of joking and argue that older forms of joking have been recalibrated to address the radical sense of discontinuity and also loss of a relevant past or even present which has become so prominent not only in durban but across South Africa

I tackle the difficult and controversial theme of racism and fear of Africans among people of Indian origin in chapter 3 ldquocharous and ra-vans A Story of Mutual nonrecognitionrdquo The relationship between in-dentured Indians and Zulu speakers in the province of natal was tense and contentious throughout the twentieth century The large riots in




1949 in durban when Indian homes were attacked by African workers as well as subsequent conflicts in 1985 and after apartheid left a legacy of apprehension and suspicion between the two communities that peri-odically erupt in racist allegations from both sides I explore this history and the mythologies of cato Manor the Indian-African neighborhood that was the epicenter of the 1949 riots I draw on narratives I collected as well as the representation of this area and the relationship with Af-ricans in plays and fiction The last part of the chapter explores the tension between what I call ldquoracismrsquos two bodiesrdquomdashnotions of surface and substancemdashin racial practices among Indians Finally I explore the circulation of racialized fear among young people in schools and on street corners and argue that the influx of large numbers of Africans in chatsworth has fundamentally transformed the cherished idea of the area as a knowable site of cultural intimacy

chapter 4 ldquoAutonomy Freedom and Political Speechrdquo explores the development of political institutions of autonomy that were designed for Indians during the apartheid years I try to flesh out the pervasive sense of unreality and absurdity that accompanied the heavily circum-scribed functions of these bodies and how this consolidated an already pervasive disengagement from the world of politics in the township I argue that from the 1980s representative politics became subsumed un-der a larger imperative of enjoyment and self-deprecating humor Politi-cal figures and their speech are still not read literally but are transposed into a form of entertainment and performance that is enjoyed at a dis-tance This apprehension vis-agrave-vis the world of politics is clearly more pronounced among non-African communities in South Africa but still defines an important and ill-understood dimension of the postapart-heid ldquounhappy consciousnessrdquo

In chapter 5 ldquoMovement Sound and Body in the Postapartheid cityrdquo I investigate the rise of new forms of physical social and cultural mobility in the postapartheid city in particular the rise of the kombi taxi and its massive sound system as the most striking innovation in the urban landscape While the private taxi industry has been at the center of much violence and criminal networks it has also been important in providing new forms of agile physical mobility across the erstwhile fixed boundaries in the city More important the taxis have also been the vehicles and symbols of a new type of music and youth culture that begins to cut across boundaries of class and race I explore the particu-lar form of taxi industry in chatsworth and look at the wider phenom-enon of the new sonic taste alliances forged by kwaito (a form of South African pop music) and other forms of urban music after apartheid

chapter 6 ldquoThe unwieldy Fetish desi Fantasies roots tourism and diasporic desiresrdquo looks at the new economy of diasporic imagi-




nation that hit South Africa after 1994 I begin by exploring a range of narratives of roots tourism whereby thousands of South African Indi-ans each year travel to India in search of the village of their ancestors and for shopping andor spiritual purification These journeys are often complex discoveries of both the real and the imaginary India and are almost invariably linked to desires for purification and ldquoproperrdquo Indian-ness and ldquoculturerdquo which in their turn are spawned by social mobility and ambition The other side of this new fascination with Indiarsquos past and its emerging power as a nation is an intense interest in Bollywood films and their songs stars and aesthetics The revival of the interest in Indian films dates to the arrival of a new type of teenage flick that catered to a diasporic market and sensibility I explore this moment in 1998 and the discussion of Indianness and the global standing of In-dian culture it gave rise to

chapter 7 ldquoGlobal Hindus and Pure Muslims universalist Aspira-tions and territorialized Livesrdquo explores the quest for religious puri-fication that has arisen from the Indian middle class in South Africa since the 1980s I look at the power and attractiveness of neo-Hindu movements in South Africa and how new and more standardized Brah-manical forms of Hinduism today clash with the popular customs and traditions that still inform weddings and ideas of belief and rituals in the Indian townships A strikingly similar logic of purification is at work among the Muslims of Indian origin only even more so Apart-heid forced forms of social and ritual sharing upon communities that despite their common religious orientation have little desire or inclina-tion to share social spaces or mosques The postapartheid society has made it possible for the traditional Muslim elite the merchant commu-nities of Gujarati origin to embrace global piety movements and to re-imagine their own genealogies as somehow ldquoArabrdquo and thus not South Asian The theological schism between scripturally oriented purists and the proponents of traditional Sunni Islam of a more Sufi-oriented popular South Asian variety has been mapped onto long-standing class differences between Gujarati-speaking elites and predominantly urdu-speaking working-class Muslims In both cases South Africa has become yet another field wherein global conflicts play out in complex local configurations

In chapter 8 ldquoThe Saved and the Backsliders The charou Soul and the Instability of Beliefrdquo I explore how the process of reevaluating onersquos past and reaching for a future beyond a clear ethnoracial definition is played out among the thousands of ordinary working-class Indians in chatsworth and elsewhere who convert to Pentecostal christianity I argue that these conversions which have gathered significant force since 1994 reflect a desire for respectability and purity but even more




so a powerful attempt to find a religious identity that seems both intel-ligible and in tune with the culture of the larger South Africa society I look at how these church communities among many other things negotiate new forms of inclusion and embody a promise of being both included in the new nation and global yet decidedly and conspicuously nonpolitical Like governmental interventions and most political and cultural activism the multiple churches identify the charou home and the charou soul as the main targets of reform and purification

In the postscript I reflect on how much of the situation I describe in this book may have wider applicability across community location and class in South Africa I also speculate briefly on how Zumarsquos presidency is altering predominant styles of politics and public culture toward a more ordinary imperfect but also culturally intimate style of political performance that may lead to naked majoritarianism but that also may prove hospitable to the countryrsquos many minorities

Methods and Material

The deep segmentation of South African society has resulted in a cer-tain insidious segmentation of scholarship and ethnographic work along racial lines that carries on to this day Writing the new South Af-rica across these lines and understanding the complex links across and between racially defined groups is one of the biggest challenges facing anyone writing about contemporary South Africa I cannot claim that I have overcome this problem in this book which draws the main bulk of its material from areas and people that were classified as Indian Many of my interlocutors and informants over the years have assumed that I was writing an Indian community history as this is indeed the com-mon formula of the vast majority of local studies and local perceptions of history and heritage I do however pay as much attention as I can throughout the text to the many entanglements encounters tensions and confrontations with other worlds and other people that shaped the social world of my informants

The material I draw on in the following has been collected over nearly a decade and spans extensive ethnographic field notes hundreds of interviews cultural and media products archives of government in-stitutions and multiple local cultural religious and civic institutions The magnitude of my material and the limitations of what one can do in a single book means that I do not do full justice to many details or events that I touch on Fieldwork was conducted for a year in 1998ndash 99 for six months in 2001 three months in 2002 annual or biannual visits in the following years and then another three months in 2007 In keeping with standard anthropological practice most of my informants




appear under pseudonyms while those holding public office have been mentioned by their proper names I hope that my friends will forgive this adherence to a convention that still serves the discipline as a whole quite well This is an academic book not written for a lay audience but hopefully not inaccessible to students and interested readers outside the academy to my many friends and informants in durban and Johan-nesburg you may find much of what I am arguing somewhat outdated already you will surely find much to disagree with some recognizable figures and events but hopefully also a thing or two to appreciate I hope you will read this work as one that opens the world of the charous to a wider world of discussion within South Africa and in the world of global scholarship It is also an invitation to continue our enjoyable banter and debate that we began more than a decade ago about cha-rous South Africa and the world




garbagerdquo and dragged his disappointed family with him The young couples behind me were loudly discussing what the film was about and started laughing in disbelief at some of the exaggerated sound effects and the quality of acting Soon they also left the hall while making jokes about how this film was indeed a broken promise I soon found myself in the hall with a handful of local Indians who were laughing heartily while also sending me the only outsider left occasional glances and slightly nervous smiles as they watched my reactions

This slight measure of unease or mild embarrassment in my friends and informants was well known to me When watching a performance or partaking in this aspect of the cultural life of the Indian townships I often felt that I was watching something that was not meant for me as if I represented a gaze that was out of place This film was clearly neither meant for me nor made for my eyes The unease was not born of hostil-ity or protectiveness but rather from a sense of embarrassment now I could see for myself how things really were with them These films as most of the popular culture among South African Indians (which I will return to later in this book) revolve around an internal gaze that is making what people often refer to as ldquothe communityrdquo (of Indians in the country) visible to itself through jokes and self-deprecating humor This is where a ldquowerdquo is generated and reproduced a sense of who we really are where we came from and how foolish we are This is neither the official story nor any authorized representation of the community It is the informal inner space that most of my informants in the township and many who have left the township know very intimately It is also a side of the community that appears silly and unrefined to those who have climbed into the middle class or have constituted its historical elite since the nineteenth century Yet it is also funny because it mocks a past that was shared in the face of systematic discrimination and his-torical exclusion from institutional and public spaces in the country What unifies the South African Indians today are the laugh and the self-deprecating joke

This embarrassment vis-agrave-vis an outside gaze indicates one of the most difficult problematics across postapartheid South Africa to rede-fine identities communities and selves within a new economy of rec-ognition that is to live under a new and differentiated gaze that feels unfamiliar and never fully intelligible This differentiated gaze marks new horizons of recognitionmdashsome local some national and others global In the cinema hall that evening we the audience represented several forms of gazemdashthe foreign visitors the new black middle class the local Indian elitemdashall of whom were puzzled or even disappointed at the obvious banality of the film on display This small event was but



























































































































































Hansen crc pp - Princeton Universityassets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9757.pdf · In the cinema...

Documents

Transcript of Hansen crc pp - Princeton Universityassets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9757.pdf · In the cinema...